A FULL BODY EXPERIENCE

We all remember the first hit. The first rattle of the ribcage, when it feels like the vibrations will overwhelm your lungs. Stephen Keegan was 14 and Muse had just taken the stage at the Point.

Feature Music — Gigs — Disability

I knew I was hooked. Hooked enough to study journalism in college, so I could specialise in writing about live music. An unusual aim, maybe, for someone like me. I’m hard of hearing—a user of hearing aids, a genetic gift from my matrilineal forebears.

No sarcasm intended there—like many in the wider d/Deaf community, I am proud of my difference, and thankful for it. When people who wear bras talk about taking them off after a long day, that’s me with my hearing aids. If some genie or stem cell therapy offered me a ‘cure’, no way would I take it.

I was raised in a family of people who are also hard of hearing, so it’s always been normalised for me. I was lucky not to be teased for it in school, though maybe I didn’t hear what they were saying? It helped that one of my closest friends there is also hard of hearing.

Barry, now 30, was at that first Muse gig with me, and we’ve shared countless experiences at gigs, festivals and club nights since. We often compare our experiences, as the nature of our hearing loss is not exactly the same.

One thing that is common to us is that it’s a congenital condition. “I was born with this,” Barry tells me, “so I do not know what I am missing out on. It’s a case of not knowing any better, you know? I get enjoyment out of what I can at gigs, and what I can perceive is completely different from what everyone else perceives.”

Ignorance isn’t always bliss though. The most restricted I felt in my ambitions was a court reporting assignment in college. No matter how much I turned up my hearing aids, I just couldn’t catch what was happening—I felt so lost, isolated, and annoyed that I couldn’t carry out my professional duties. It’s a chastening experience common to most hard of hearing people.

That’s why gigs can be such an escape for Barry and I. Having that instantaneous, reaffirming feedback through the kinetic energy of the crowd—roars, sing-alongs, a good mosh pit, even. “The band and the crowd—two different types of energy that both smack off each other,” Barry says. It’s the furthest possible feeling from that isolation for us. We may be hard of hearing, but our other senses are heightened at that moment.

We are both drawn to more intense musical experiences as a result. A recent highlight for us has been Galway’s Ar Ais Arís, a collective focused on bass-heavy genres that often hire in extremely powerful sound systems. At those kinds of nights, even if our ears aren’t doing the job, we’ll hear through pure bone conduction regardless.

The flipside is that for us, quieter moments may be lost on us. “I am someone who loves cooking,” says Barry. “It is my first passion, my favourite little things to cook are dishes which are, in terms of ingredients, very simple, but the sum of the parts comes together to make something greater.

“Now, if you are making a recipe with four ingredients, the rest of the dish is going to be significantly altered if one of those ingredients is missing. Whereas if you make a recipe with 20 or 25 ingredients, if one of those ingredients is not there, it’s harder to notice.

“That can be a summary of my experience going to see bands. If there is a lot going on—if there are a lot of different melodies, big beats, harmonies, bass—then if I don’t pick up on certain things, there is still a lot I can focus on.

“In more stripped-back live settings, I feel like I am at more of a disadvantage because if I’m picking up on one less element, I am missing out on comparatively more of the gig.”

A silent-disco style setup is Barry’s suggestion for improving a quieter, folkier gig. It could also help cut out audience chatter, “a huge problem when we saw Lankum recently,” he grimaces. An annoyance for us all, of course, but for us it’s tough enough to focus on one source of audio without further distraction.

If people are not able to fully experience one sense, why not turn another one up? London superclub Fabric is one of my favourite places to experience dance music. It’s worth the queues and intensive security checks to experience the revered BodyKinectic dancefloor in Room 1, which uses 36 transducers to shake the floor in time to the music. It’s the kind of immersive haptic feedback familiar to anyone who’s held a PlayStation controller, scaled up to a full-body experience.

There’s a similar system in place in Glasgow’s Sub Club—I’ll never forget being rattled like a paint mixer by KW Griff’s ‘Bring in the Katz’ on that floor. It’s hard to see Irish clubs making the kind of investment needed to install such a dancefloor though, when they find themselves constrained by our archaic licensing laws, and more are closing their doors year on year.

Fabric has notably partnered with Deaf Rave, a UK organisation led by DJ Troi Lee, who put on events for the d/Deaf community, including DJ workshops and songwriting classes. Troi is an advocate for wearable haptic devices like Woojer or Subpac vests, which aim to replicate the BodyKinectic experience locally on your body. They help “pick up the bass” in a track if he’s DJing, he tells Mixmag, and combined with the visual cues found in DJ software like AlphaTheta’s Rekordbox or Serato, they can help d/Deaf people experience music whether they’re on the decks or out on the floor.

These devices often run at price tags starting in the hundreds per unit, so who will shoulder the cost of providing this kind of accessibility? Promoters and venues are often operating on the margins as it is. The Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth operates the Disability Participation and Awareness Fund each year—perhaps a non-profit can use it to acquire such devices?

One service that has taken advantage of this fund is Music Health Ireland, a non-profit that aims to bring music programmes to healthcare settings. It began its ‘Notes and Signs’ project in 2023 as a way of addressing barriers it was experiencing in bringing its services to d/Deaf patients. “Securing hearing Irish Sign Language interpreters for live music performance was almost impossible,” the organisation noted at the time.

There are currently 118 people on the Register of Irish Sign Language, just over half of whom work as interpreters full-time. It’s a smaller subset again that are trained for music interpretation.

Interpreters at stadium gigs like Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour often go viral when people video the visual intensity of their performance—they move and work as hard as any dancers on stage. That takes a lot of preparation, akin to learning any choreography, but with the added challenge of translating lyrics from a spoken language like English into a signed language like ISL.

This shortage of interpreters for the country means that they must be booked well in advance, particularly as the cognitive intensity of the job means that teams of two or more are required to allow for breaks and rotation to ensure consistent standards of interpretation. In response, Music Health Ireland worked with Deaf musician Ruth Montgomery of UK non-profit Audiovisibility to design continuous personal development courses for ISL interpreters who want to add music interpretation to their skillset.

The recent Disrupt Disability Arts festival in Dublin was closed by Sign the Night Away, an ISL performance from Sarah-Jane O’Regan. Events like this could introduce more people into the world of expression through ISL and hopefully inspire more budding interpreters to take up the craft.

Bigger venues and events are slowly becoming more accessible to ISL users, with the 3Arena and Electric Picnic offering interpreter services for those who apply in advance. ISL users can also avail of the Sign Language Interpreting Service’s social inclusion voucher scheme. This initiative will cover a half-day rate for two interpreters for live performances, including their preparation time. An ISL user can only avail of these vouchers up to five times per year, which means they might have to face a choice: do they use the voucher to attend a gig or a play, or do they save them in case they need to use them for a wedding or a funeral?

People who are frequently exposed to live music— whether on stage, in the crowds or as venue staff—are at huge risk of damaging their hearing. If you’re regularly in these environments, protecting your ears is smart.

Earplugs that attenuate harsh high-end frequencies are a godsend for Barry. “It makes me less anxious at a gig… the safety and the knowledge that my hearing is being protected does give me a degree of confidence, and it makes me a bit more relaxed.” That’s what enables us to keep going back for hit after hit.